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CNET Update

End of an era: BlackBerry stops making BlackBerrys

The Canadian company announces it will no longer build its own hardware, and instead focus on software.

1:32 / 29 September 2016

Transcript

[MUSIC]
It's the end of an era.
Blackberry announced it will no longer make its own phone.
The announcement is a nail in the coffin for the long struggling Canadian company.
Instead of building hardware, Blackberry said it's gonna save money by relying on other companies to design, build and sell the devices.
But BlackBerry already started backing away from building phones.
The most recent BlackBerry phone, the DTEK50, it was actually made by Alcatel and it ran Android.
It just had some BlackBerry apps preloaded on it.
And before that was the BlackBerry Priv, a high-end Android phone with a Slide out keyboard and some extra security features, but that also failed to take off.
Long ago, Blackberry was the king of phones for a mobile white collar workforce.
In the early 2000s, its keyboard was what made people fall in love with the brand to the point where fans called themselves Crackberry addicts Over time of course it was dethroned by the iPhone and Google's Android phones.
Just think back two years after the iPhone came out Blackberry made up one fifth of the mobile phone market.
Today, it's a fraction of 1%.
That's according to Garner.
As for now, Blackberry is not going away completely.
The company says instead it's gonna put all of its focus on software
[MUSIC]
There still could be some value in the Blackberry brand when it comes to security applications such as ways for big businesses to manage e-mail.
That's it for this tech news update.
I'm Bridget Carey.
You can stay on top of the latest stories at cnet.com/update.

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